Looking At IT - MCSE - Guidance Needed Please

[Syd]

Please forgive me if I seem 'green' or naive, it's just i'm starting to look at this subject and I thought I'd ask advice from the most obvious group before I proceed any further!!!!!

I'm 36 and I have been in sales all of my working life, after leaving school with some mediocre A lvls and an HND in business. I sell cars for a Prestige motor manufacturer and have done for some years, i'm pretty good at it and it earns me a good living, but the hours are pretty diabolical, pressure is unrelenting (although I accept that that's part of any job today!) and weekends are written off.

We have also decided that we would like to start a family soon (as long as everything functions OK!!!)


So I've been thinking for sometime what I could look to do - and start training in (whilst still working)
that could allow me, within a reasonable time frame to earn a similar wage, with potential to exceed my current constraints, whilst also allowing me weekends at home with the family.

I've looked at tradesman (my father is an ageing electrician) and a couple of management routes, however I keep coming back to the idea of targetting the IT industry.

I may be barking up the wrong tree and please tell me if I am disillusioned, but I sell very nice cars to alot of IT contractors who seem pretty comfortable, and the company I work for is a global PLC so there may be opportunity for me to move within my current employer.

Is the first step to look at basic MCSE training? Another contractor I know quite well suggested putting a basic server/network together at home and using that as a practice/learning rig (I have the odd old PC lying about - like all of us!!!!)

Any tips or guidance you guys and Girls could give me would really help me, and thank you all for taking the trouble to read this

[scaryjim]

Firstly, think very carefully. IT isn't any more stable than the automotive industry at the minute, and while this probably isn't a bad time to start thinking about a career move, it's definitely a bad time to do anything rash!

Secondly, having a career change at the same as starting a family probably isn't the best plan. If you've been doing the same job for some years there's a very real chance that you'll end up taking a reasonable salary cut to move into IT, as you'll have to accept an entry level position.

If I haven't put you off yet, then here's some more things to think about:

What area of IT do you want to go into? General support is probably the easiest to get started in, but doesn't often pay well. Programming can pay very well, but you'd have a fairly large knowledge base to catch up on. Or do you want to specialise: network infrastructure? Database Admin? Linux guru?

Sorry that's not more positive: I think you would probably find a move into IT very rewarding, but it's a big field and I really think you need to narrow down what you want to do a bit more before I make any suggestions on a path...

[Syd]

Firstly, think very carefully. IT isn't any more stable than the automotive industry at the minute, and while this probably isn't a bad time to start thinking about a career move, it's definitely a bad time to do anything rash!

Secondly, having a career change at the same as starting a family probably isn't the best plan. If you've been doing the same job for some years there's a very real chance that you'll end up taking a reasonable salary cut to move into IT, as you'll have to accept an entry level position.

If I haven't put you off yet, then here's some more things to think about:

What area of IT do you want to go into? General support is probably the easiest to get started in, but doesn't often pay well. Programming can pay very well, but you'd have a fairly large knowledge base to catch up on. Or do you want to specialise: network infrastructure? Database Admin? Linux guru?

Sorry that's not more positive: I think you would probably find a move into IT very rewarding, but it's a big field and I really think you need to narrow down what you want to do a bit more before I make any suggestions on a path...

Thank you Jim for coming back with such sensible and honest advice, to respond:

Stability is not the driving force for my move or the grounding for the thought of change. Although the automotive industry is 'challenging' the brand I woork for has protected me from the worst of the effects sofar at least! The driving forces behind my thought processes are definatley looking at medium term (to me that's 5 years)

I would like to: get off of the 'shop floor' and have the chance to use my head more than my legs and my mouth a little more! I need to have the potential of earning sensible money, and what my perspective of that is to be able to earn £50k + I do appreciate that in the short term I cannot walk into a position earning what I am now, nowhere near, however I would like to think that with effort (and hopefully ability) I would be able to accelerate through the scales relativly quickly???

And most importantly I would like to be able to improve my quality of life, and be able to spend more time with my family and to a point have more control over when I work.

In terms of a reality check as to my potential, would an MCSE course done in my own time be a good general barometer of my ability, as I understand it is pretty much a basic requirement for whatever speacialised path I wanted to follow?

[b0redom]

Despite what you see on the TV, you're not guaranteed a job paying tens of thousands of pounds in IT. The barriers to entry are just too low.

You're unlikely to succeed as a contractor until you have a few years experience behind you. Companies tend to hire them as they are very experienced and can hit the ground running. At this time of year, you're also likely to be competing for junior roles with new grads who have no dependents, so will work longer hours and will accept a much lower wage.

Realisticly if you're looking at a sideways move, you'd be better looking at SE/Presales/Account Management roles. All of these have a larger components of customer management and soft skills, so you should be a fairly strong candidate on that basis, and may be able to use them whilst you bone up on the technology. They are far more likely to pay well at a junior level too.

[Allen]

I made a gamble of moving to IT a few years back after working in Finance for several years. Ended up taking a massive pay cut (but nowhere near as much as you would take) and was much happier at work.

Saying that though, I made the move with no IT qualifications behind me. I've now been working in IT for 2-3 years, done 1st line, 2nd line and field engineer jobs and still haven't taken one exam. Although my current job supplies all the materials needed to study most MS qualifications and will pay for the exams if you pass, so I need to get working on them!

However, I'm still about £5k short of what I was earning before and struggling every month, so my suggestion would be to wait until after you've had kids as you're gonna need the money! Use the time until then to study and get some decent qualifications behind you, then the pay cut will hopefully not be as much.

[scaryjim]

An MCSE course would give you an idea of where you are, but they're a pretty expensive way to dip your toe in the water Are there any local colleges that might offer suitable evening classes at lesser expense? Also, have you considered the Open University? They do a few IT modules that might be appropriate, you can stick them on your CV, and if you do move into IT you could build up to a diploma or degree.

A quick browse of the Grauniad jobs site suggests that down south £50k is probably acheivable in IT (very different picture up here, of course). Main areas currently seem to be development (predominantly .NET), databases / SQL / data management, and project management. Whether you could realistically expect to get into one of those jobs in 5 years time, given the amount of domain knowledge you'd have to pick up, is questionable, but I think in the longer term you should be fine.

Don't think that moving into IT is suddenly going to give you your evenings and weekends back; that's entirely dependent on who ends up employing you and in what kind of role. However, it maybe better than your current employment: obviously I'm not in a position to say

What I would say, though, is that you really don't sound very sure about moving to IT - you just want to get out of what you're doing now. Is there any management scale you could progress up from your current role, or something you could make a more sideways move into? For instance, my sister used to be an on-the-road sales rep: when she started a family she took a couple of qualifications and within a few years had moved into a management role where she had a lot more freedom over her work times and patterns but was still using the domain knowledge that she'd built up in the previous 5 - 10 years of employment. She didn't have to take any drop in salary to acheive that, or do any significant retraining, and best of all I think her work paid at least some of the cost of her qualifications. It might be something worth looking into alongside looking at the move into IT...

[Moby-Dick]

*cough* its not the MCSE any more

I've been in IT for about 9 years now after starting pretty much at the bottom on night shift help desk. It took me about 7 years to hit the kinds of salary you are after , although thats not adjusted for inflation. ( and I didn't actualy complete my MCSE untill about 2008 or so )

you do need the raw techincal skills , but the underlying communications skills and other soft skills are just as important.

[smargh]

Sharepoint.

It's horrible to develop for, but companies pay over the odds for contractors and regular employees.

[scaryjim]

*cough* its not the MCSE any more

Is it not? I considered it back in 2004, then went down the MSc route instead. Not sure i picked the best option, tbh...

[Syd]

WoW - There's a wealth of knowledge out there, I knew it was the first place to ask - thank you all very much for your thoughts.

Jim - Yes you are right I do want to move my self eventually from what I do - however the management structure, at least locally is such that they wore pretty much the same hours as I do, and TBH I think I would rather stay on the floor than run a team of automotive sales executives!!!
Hence why I have been looking at alternatives. Double thanks to you for looking omb at the resources you have, it is really helpful And I will look into what local/remote options are available.

However IT has always interested me, and it is somthing that i thought I could turn my hand to, however a role that could take adavntage of my current skill set in IT, whilst allowing me to develop the technical side may be a less financially threatening option.

Realisticly if you're looking at a sideways move, you'd be better looking at SE/Presales/Account Management roles. All of these have a larger components of customer management and soft skills, so you should be a fairly strong candidate on that basis, and may be able to use them whilst you bone up on the technology. They are far more likely to pay well at a junior level too.

Again please forgive my ignorance but would you be able to elaborate on the roles that you mentioned please b0redom

[peterb]

I think Scaryjim hit the nail on the head - there is such a huge range of "IT" jobs that you need to narrow the field. Just as in Sales, where you could be anything from the junior sales receptionist up to sales director (who probably rarely sells anything as it is a senior management position) so the same is true in IT - but with far more entry points.

So at the entry point you could be on a help desk for an organisation, where detailed knowledge of a companies products would be essential, or a system operator. Then there is installation (network cabling, through to network design and system architecture design. Programming and application development is another area, and one where with the right skills, you can make good money, but (as agent said) you need some business knowledge to understand what and why you are developing an application for.

And finally there is IT management, which probably involves less hands on, and either staff management in an IT environment, or IT project management, and then moving onto strategic ITT development for an organisation, which gets you into the IT director/board level positions.

On the periphery are the specialist skills such as IT security.

And that only scratches the surface.

Qualifications you might like to consider are The British Computer Society designations, such as CITP (Certified IT professional) but it really depends on where you see yourself ending up, as hands on in IT where the rewards are likely to be lower, or in management/design/specialist niche areas where the rewards are likely to be higher.

I say likely because these are generalisations, but a look in the national papers or websites like jobsite will give you some scope of the qualifications needed for the jobs available and the salary levels you might expect.